{"id":1500,"date":"2015-12-16T15:41:05","date_gmt":"2015-12-16T15:41:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/v2.markerly.com\/blog\/?p=1500"},"modified":"2015-12-16T15:41:05","modified_gmt":"2015-12-16T15:41:05","slug":"three-ways-to-track-your-influencer-marketing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/staging.markerly.com\/pulse\/three-ways-to-track-your-influencer-marketing\/","title":{"rendered":"Three Ways to Track Your Influencer Marketing"},"content":{"rendered":"

Reading Time: <\/span> 2<\/span> minutes<\/span><\/span>Brands spend millions of dollars on influencer marketing every year but unfortunately, most of them are not accurately tracking their efforts. There are so many moving parts when it comes to tracking influencers, especially when it involves influencers posting across multiple platforms.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m going to go over three very simple ways to track your influencer marketing efforts to ensure that you\u2019re able to accurately attribute performance metrics to the right influencers.<\/p>\n

Why is tracking important?<\/strong>
\nIf you\u2019re planning on having a long-term influencer marketing program\u00a0then it\u2019s crucial to understand which influencers are performing the best. This is so that you can allocate the majority of your resources to the top performers while pulling away resources from the poor performers (AKA optimization).<\/p>\n

1. Tracking Links<\/strong>
\nStrength: Tracking Direct Traffic Flow<\/p>\n

There are two common ways of tracking traffic via links.<\/p>\n

Redirects:
\nServices such is bit.ly use redirects so that they can offer a short link and track user data. The mechanics of a URL redirect is very simple. Javascript (frontend method) and PHP\/Python\/Ruby on Rails (backend method) are commonly used to initiate the redirect and it typically only requires one line of code.<\/p>\n

Many different types of data can be retrieved via redirects (e.g. user agent, IP address, location, referrer, etc\u2026). Redirects really come in handy when you don\u2019t have code installed on the landing page which the link is pointing to. It\u2019s like a pit-stop\u2013before arriving at your destination\u2013where you can collect some data on the user before sending her\u00a0off on her\u00a0way.<\/p>\n

URL Parameters:
\nURL parameters are very common. Have you ever noticed URLs with question marks and ampersands (i.e. \u201cwww.testing.com?tracking_param=tracking_this&other_param=tracking_this_to\u201d)? Tracking parameters are quite simple as well. All you need to do is append the URL with whatever information you want to track when the page loads\u2013you can do this with any URL by the way and it won\u2019t affect the way the page loads (try google.com?testing=test). When the page loads you can read the URL parameters (usually with only one line of code) and save the data to your database\/log.<\/p>\n

2. Promo Codes<\/strong>
\nStrength: Tracking Offline Activities<\/p>\n

Promo codes can be a great way to track performance during an influencer campaign especially when you\u2019re trying to track actions such as purchases, store visits, etc\u2026 All you do is have the influencers distribute their own unique promo codes to their followers. You can then track how many redemptions each individual influencer-generated.<\/p>\n

Many Point of Purchase systems have functionality for supporting promo codes so you\u2019d just need to check with your POS vendor to better understand the best way to run such promos so that everything is seamlessly tracked from influencer all the way to in-store purchase.<\/p>\n

3. Social Data<\/strong>
\nStrength: Understanding Brand Recall, Reputation, and Engagement<\/p>\n

Understanding your influencers\u2019 social impact is crucial, especially if the main objective of your influencer campaign is to drive brand awareness and engagement. Tracking social data can be daunting. If you aren\u2019t a programmer there are many social listening services out there for tracking social data. If you do write code, then you can simply leverage the APIs of the top social platforms to collect and process social data.<\/p>\n

Important things to look out for:<\/p>\n

-The number of comments and subsequent social posts that were generated due to an influencer posting on their social account.<\/p>\n

-The total reach (the total number of followers that the influencer has as well as the sum of followers of each person that commented that promoted the post).<\/p>\n

-Traffic flow to your website\/app from an influencer posting.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reading Time: <\/span> 2<\/span> minutes<\/span><\/span> Brands spend millions of dollars on influencer marketing every year but unfortunately, most of them are not accurately tracking their efforts. There are so many moving parts when it comes to tracking influencers, especially when it involves influencers posting across multiple platforms. I\u2019m going to go over three very simple ways to track your influencer…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1694,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[6,106,121,153,156,173,190,191,193],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.markerly.com\/pulse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1500"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.markerly.com\/pulse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.markerly.com\/pulse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.markerly.com\/pulse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.markerly.com\/pulse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1500"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/staging.markerly.com\/pulse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1500\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.markerly.com\/pulse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1694"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.markerly.com\/pulse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1500"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.markerly.com\/pulse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1500"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.markerly.com\/pulse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1500"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}